The Distance of A Light Year

The Distance of a Light Year is a 3D animated short film following the journey of a lonely girl living on a planet who spends her whole life looking for connection and travels the universe to find it. The story is inspired by a planet, PSO J318.5-22, found by scientists in 2013. The girl builds millions of shining paper stars and uses them as a revolving light signal on her lighthouse to draw attention to the dark universe. One day, she finds someone who responds with a blue light signal from a blue planet. But her lighthouse does not function. And so, she releases all of her paper stars and lets them float into a starry river. She travels years across the starry river across the universe but eventually finds out the river is not long enough to reach the blue planet. When she is about to give up and feels the most desperate, blue shining paper planes fly toward her and extend the river. On a huge paper plane, comes an old person flying toward her. Finally, she finds the connection and fulfills her life

Investigations of the Underlying Mechanisms of HIF-1{\alpha} and CITED2 Binding to TAZ1

The TAZ1 domain of CREB binding protein is crucial for transcriptional regulation and recognizes multiple targets. The interactions between TAZ1 and its specific targets are related to the cellular hypoxic negative feedback regulation. Previous experiments reported that one of the TAZ1 targets CITED2 is an efficient competitor of another target HIF-1{\alpha}. Here by developing the structure-based models of TAZ1 complexes we have uncovered the underlying mechanisms of the competitions between HIF-1{\alpha} and CITED2 binding to TAZ1. Our results are consistent with the experimental hypothesis on the competition mechanisms and the apparent affinity. In addition, the simulations prove the dominant position of forming TAZ1-CITED2 complex in both thermodynamics and kinetics. For thermodynamics, TAZ1-CITED2 is the lowest basin located on the free energy surface of binding in the ternary system. For kinetics, the results suggest that CITED2 binds to TAZ1 faster than HIF-1{\alpha}. Besides, the analysis of contact map and f values in this study will be helpful for further experiments on TAZ1 systems.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figure

Failure analysis of cold-formed steel sections

The purlin-sheeting system has been the subject of numerous theoretical and experimental investigations over the past 30 years, but the complexity of the problem has led to great difficulty in developing a sound and general model. The primary aim of the thesis is to investigate the failure behaviours of cold-formed zed and channel sections for use in purlin-sheeting systems. Both the energy method and finite strip method are used to develop an approach to investigate cold-formed zed and channel section beams with partial-lateral restraint from the metal sheeting when subjected to a uniformly distributed transverse load. The stress analysis of cold-formed zed and channel section beams with partially-lateral restraint from the metal sheeting when subjected to a uniformly distributed transverse load is investigated firstly by using the analytical model based on the energy method in which the restraint actions of the sheeting are modelled by using two springs representing the translational and rotational restraints. The numerical results have showed that the two springs have significantly different influences on the stresses of the beams. The influence of the two springs has also been found to depend on the anti-sag bar and the position of the loading line. A novel method is presented for analysing the elastic local buckling behaviour of cold-formed zed and channel section beams with partial-lateral restraint from metal sheeting when subjected to a uniformly distributed transverse load, which is carried out by inputting the cross sectional stresses with the largest compressive stress into the finite strip analysis. By using the presented novel method, individual influences of warning stress, partially lateral restraints from the sheeting and the dimensions of the cross section and position of the loading line on the buckling behaviour are investigated